Wednesday, March 31

Well, either a supernatural schoolgirl or a moeblob. My desktops are Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi and Tanarotte, and for the next desktop I'll probably skip back to Shana. My old notebook is Potemayo. My file servers are Pepper and Salt and will be joined by Sugar as soon as the LaCie 5big Network 2 ships.

8
Themes! The desktops are all named after schoolgirl goddesses (Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi... and Tanarotte, who sort of fits), the external drives are weather fairies (Sugar, Pepper, Salt). And for computers I usually only ever use one character from a series, because I name my virtual servers for the other characters, as you can see from Tanarotte. I run a lot of virtual servers.

Sonsaku Hakufu is supernatural. She's possessed by a dragon, and in ITDD she gains control over it, which permits her to fly and to fight with supernatural strength. That, in turn, opens up a lot of other girls' names for virtual machines: Ryuubi, Kanu, Ryoumo...

Arika Yumimiya is supernatural. She's the only otome who can reach "materialize zwei". That, too, opens up lots of other names: Mai, Nina, Natsuki, Haruka, Sara...

But neither of them are deities. Where do you draw the line on how supernatural "supernatural" is?

I'll be keeping the main system on the current hardware, and using one of these (actually a somewhat larger model, but the same bandwidth) to offload bulk content (podcasts, videos, file downloads, media streams) automatically via Minx. That essentially erases my bandwidth worries for the next five years.

1
100 TB for $133?!? Eek! I pay about 20 times more per TB... (Fortunately for my pocketbook, I'm only paying for 1 TB on my teensy tiny server.)
Hmm... If I'm doing my arithmetic correctly, that corresponds to about 300 Mbps continuous for 30 days, can a Pentium D 930 really push that much out (while pulling 38 MB/s off a 7200 RPM drive)?

Posted by: Kayle at Monday, March 29 2010 04:46 PM (a2DI7)

2
Realistically, there's no way that server is going to push 100TB a month. But even if you're only getting 10TB, it's still a great deal. And your arithmetic is spot-on.

Saturday, March 27

After The Steppe Cat, What?

So three series that I have been enjoying immensely are drawing to a close: Hidamari Sketch x Hoshimittsu, for which I held some misgivings that proved quite unwarranted; Sora no Woto, which I was willing to watch on the basis of it being merely K-On Goes to War, but which quite exceeded my expectations, and Kimi ni Todoke, carried over from last season, which transcends not merely genre but time and space and is in fact the pinnacle of all human achievement past and future.

So...

Next season? We have K-On! 2, which I'll certainly watch; if it's just more moe-blobs making music that's fine with me. And there's... There's... Okay, KimiTodo was a surprise, and there's usually a surprise every season, but I'm just not seeing it at this point.

Angel Beats - that's the dead girls in snow one? Given my reaction to every one of the Key's prior outings, I don't hold out much hope for this.

There's Working and Mayoi Neko Overrun, either of which might not be completely terrible, B Gata H Kei, which almost certainly will be completely terrible, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, which might possibly be watchable, Senko no Night Raid, which promises to be a total train wreck, and a bunch of stuff that I have no interest in at all.

Google can do that kind of thing. For months now the single most read article on my blog is the one about PedoBear, which consistently gets hundreds of refers per week from Google Image Search. But not even remotely 166,000 per month! Nor do any of my ecchi cheesecake posts, not even the ones with nude pictures from Ikki Tousen.

I plead guilty on the young ladies, although none of them have big tits AND a flamethrower. Ahem. Anyway, the vast majority of my junk isn't titillating to anyone except nerds, so I'm surprised how many people actually find my blog via search engines. The most searched picture in recent times is one of Alyssa Milano actually wearing clothes; there are photos without.

I don't really have much to add to THAT's excellent review (not as awesome as their KimiTodo reviews, but still very good).

K-On Goes to War certainly broke free from its assigned stereotype, and though it went a little wobbly now and then (including in this final episode), it's a fine little series and well worth watching. Three supernatural schoolgirls out of four.*

Friday, March 26

There are reports all over the place about AMD's upcoming Opteron X12 processor, which is desgined for 2- and 4-socket motherboards and has 12 cores (except when it doesn't).

The same quote appears over and over:

Provantage is taking orders for Opteron X12 6100 series chips that run at clock speeds between 1.7GHz and 2.4GHz. The chips have 12 cores, with 16MB or 18MB of cache, and draw between 65 watts and 105 watts of power.

Which means that no-one has bothered to think about it.

The X12 (codenamed Magny-Cours) is two Istanbul chips in a single package with an internal HyperTransport link, providing four memory channels and four external HT links. Istanbul, which is based on the desktop Phenom II, has 512K of L2 cache per core and shared 6MB of L3 cache.

What that means is that a 12-core processor will have 18MB total cache.

Those 16MB processors are 8-core. So far as I can tell, no-one has noticed that.

Which leaves the question of why they hell are they called X12 processors when they're really X8?

Update: Oh, yeah, the reason I wrote this is that the cheapest of the X12 chips runs at 2GHz and costs $293. That would be incredbily cheap for a quad-socket 12-core CPU, even one that runs at 2GHz. Those chips commonly run to thousands of dollars. But it's really only an 8-core CPU, which is just terribly disappointing... Okay, actually, it's still pretty amazing value. If quad-core motherboards turn out to be affordable (and they could be, because they won't require any special glue logic) then you can build a very nice 32-core system for not a lot of money.

Wednesday, March 24

Finally went back and finished watching Kannagi; in fact, it's been so long that I simply started again from the beginning. Caught up on the final episodes last night while baby-sitting a new server.

It went in a different direction from what I was expecting, and was a bit uneven overall, but still earns three supernatural schoolgirls out of four. (By comparison, Shana and Haruhi each get 3.5, and Kamichu! gets 5.)

The ending itself wasn't as strong as it might have been - again, uneven - but the very last bit, with Tsugumi, was perfect.